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Lima Beans, Neufchâtel Style
2 cups green Lima beans or I I/4 cup butter
¼ cup butter cup dried Lima beans, soaked
1½ cups milk in water overnight
2 egg-yolks
1 teaspoon salt
Cook beans in boiling salted water until almost tender. Drain, remove skins and return to saucepan. Add fat, salt, and milk, and finish cooking. Just before serving, add slightly beaten eggyolks diluted with a little milk.
A simple French-style liaison: beans finished in milk, then enriched off the heat with egg yolks. The whole dish stands or falls on how the yolks are handled.
- Do not let it boil after the yolks go inTake the pan off the heat, stir the diluted yolks in, and return it only to the barest heat for a minute if it needs thickening. At a simmer the yolks curdle and the sauce turns grainy.
- Temper the yolks"Diluted with a little milk" means slack them with a few spoonfuls of the hot cooking milk before they go into the pan. Cold yolks dropped straight into hot liquid set in threads.
- QuantitiesThe ingredient lines print in two columns that interleave in this edition, so read them apart: 2 cups shelled fresh (or frozen) lima beans, or about 1 1/4 cups dried limas soaked overnight; 1/4 cup butter; 1 1/2 cups milk; 2 egg yolks; 1 teaspoon salt. The butter measure was checked against the printed page and reads as given.
- "Fat" means the butterThe method says 'add fat' where the ingredient list gives butter; there is no other fat in the recipe. Use the butter.
- Removing the skinsThe recipe has you slip the skins off after the first boiling, which gives a smoother result. It is tedious with fresh beans.
- TimingThe recipe gives no times. Fresh or frozen limas will generally take somewhere around 10-15 minutes in salted water to reach 'almost tender', then a further few minutes in the milk; soaked dried limas need considerably longer, on the order of 40 minutes to an hour, before the milk stage.
- YieldNo yield is given; the quantities suggest roughly four servings as a vegetable side. It does not reheat well, since the egg thickening breaks; serve it as soon as the yolks are in.
The egg-yolk liaison is the technique at the centre of this recipe: a few yolks stirred in off the fire to bind a sauce without flour. The dish name is usually taken as a nod to Neufchâtel for its soft fresh cheese, though this is a traditional reading rather than a documented one; no cheese actually appears here, so the label functions as a style marker rather than a regional recipe. Lima beans are a New World crop, and the name is conventionally linked to Lima, Peru. By 1900 they were a common garden and market vegetable in the United States, which is why a book aimed at ordinary households could assume a cook had two cups of them on hand.